A Big Loser

I made an important discovery yesterday with the aid of the internet and that indispensable tool that I always discourage my students from using, Wikipedia.

Basically, it turns out that I am a big loser.

Last Christmas, my mother gave me a CD of Joel Wizanski playing Brahms. Joel Wizanski was my piano teacher at the Peabody Prep in Baltimore when I was in high school. When I learned some years ago that he now teaches at the Yale School of Music and that his performances have been reviewed in the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post (though not always favorably), I felt like a big idiot for providing what must have been torture sessions for him hoping against hope that I would finally get my act together and actually take piano seriously. He had a lot to give, and I only took him up on very little. So I was a big loser.

But I already knew that much going into yesterday. I had already felt pangs of shame for not seizing more fully what in retrospect was a fabulous opportunity.

Yesterday's internet stalking has proved me to be an even bigger loser than I even realized, however. It turns out that Joel Wizanski was taught by Leon Fleisher, who was taught by Artur Schnabel, who was taught by Theodor Leschitizky, who was taught by Carl Czerny, whose teachers were Beethoven and Antonio Salieri. So there you have it. My musical line of authority includes Beethoven and Salieri and yet I feel proud when I can sight-read a hymn.

Someone should engraven a big scarlet L on my forehead for shame.

UVA Lacrosse Death

I have been following the UVA lacrosse death case in the media for the last few days. Not because it involves two photogenic people, not because I am happy for the opportunity to engage in the kind of class-warfare discourse that the media love to propagate (it sells, after all). Not because I am somehow more concerned when rich white people get hurt than when other folks get hurt. Not because I am scared by the realization that this sort of thing can happen "even" at a place like UVA. Not because I take an almost sadistic, voyeuristic pleasure in hearing endless recountings of just how gruesome the last moments of this lacrosse player's life seem to have been.

I'm interested largely because I am an alum of Mr. Jefferson's university and feel my part in the collective mourning that has come upon our community.

UVA has a long and storied tradition of student self-governance, with an honor code that could almost be the envy of a place like BYU. I still remember getting the honor video in the mail the summer before my first year and watching in awe as I saw recounted the almost mythical (albeit very true) story of the now-famous anonymous student who taped his coins to a vending machine when it gave him a free drink or something like that. And since nothing at UVA ever gets done without the approval of its patron saint, there were even quotes in the video from Mr. Jefferson himself about the propriety of taping money to vending machines (if I'm remembering that correctly).

My point is that with this honor code in place, merely glancing at someone else's ultimately inconsequential quiz during a discussion section could get you expelled from the University. While the community of trust and honor thus created may seem reminiscent of neo-medievalist chivalric codes better suited to the antebellum Southern environment in which the University was founded than to a twenty-first- century leader in higher education, I like the honor code and have no hesitation in confessing myself to be a proud defender of it.

So in a community where storied accounts of coins taped to a vending machine prevail and students are expelled for even the smallest acts of dishonesty, what on earth is a person with no less than three run-ins with the law (including a drunken, threatening, and ultimately tasered and arrested encounter with a police officer in Rockbridge County) still doing occupying seats in the "academical village"? The lacrosse player charged with the murder of his ex-girlfriend never should have been a student at UVA in the first place. He violated the honor code long ago and should have been sent on his way packing.

Jean-Francois Cope in the NYT Today

Jean-Francois Cope is the mayor of Meaux (pronounced "Moe"), a city ingrained perpetually in my memory for both its excellent cheese and its police officers' disdain for innocently proselyting missionaries. During the Renaissance, Meaux was also known as the locus of freedom for a circle of reformation-minded theologians and thinkers, an ironic connection considering not only my own theological experiences there, but also considering Cope's strongly-worded op-ed in the New York Times yesterday calling for a public ban on the wearing of the burqa in France and throughout Europe.

(See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05cope.html?hp)

I never did like that Cope fellow. Perhaps it was his strong defense of the banning of the headscarf in French public schools a few years ago that first turned me off to him. His views, unfortunately, have become increasingly mainstream in the European Union: with the ban on minarets in Switzerland, the recently passed measure in the lower house of Belgium's legislature banning the burqa (and France likely to follow suit soon) and President Nicolas Sarkozy declaring publicly that the burqa is "not welcome" in France, religious freedom has taken some notable hits in the EU of late.

In his piece, Cope argues that the burqa must be banned because it poses a security risk.



There are approximately 1900 women who wear the burqa in France today, and I would challenge anyone to show what security threat, exactly, these women pose. Sure, some burqa-clad women robbed a post office in a shady suburb of Paris last fall and made off with 4500 Euros- wearing disguises and coverings is not uncommon in armed robbery cases. So why is no one calling for a ski mask ban then? A ban on wearing costumes in public? A ban on Halloween (an increasingly popular celebration in France, thanks to the thorough coca-colonisation of the American corporate empire)? Why is this called the ban on the burqa by the very proponents of the ban itself? If safety is the real concern, why not ban other disguises and face coverings in public as well then? That security concerns should be so closely linked to Muslims, in particular, seems troubling.

Cope wonders, "How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance — those universal signs of our common humanity — refuses to exist in the eyes of others?" It seems the problem has more to do with Cope's inability to allow such a person to exist than with the person's supposed refusal to exist. The reference to the difficulty of establishing a relationship with a person who wears a burqa probably says more about Cope's inability to embrace the Other than it does about any individual's purported refusal to exist.

Freedom of religion and of personal expression are also "universal signs of our common humanity," and to deny these is to deny the humanity of those whose religious expressions may be different from ours.

Cope goes on to note that many Muslim scholars contend that the Qur'an does not call for the wearing of the burqa. I'm no scholar here, but it does seem to me that the requirement that women wear the burqa is considered by most Muslim scholars to be outside the mainstream of Islamic thought. Nevertheless, it is not the place of the French government to interpret the Qur'an for individual women, or to dictate what the "true" meaning of its passages are. This is simply a violation of the separation of church and state, a principle that the secularist Cope ostensibly stands for. It's simple: no law in France should make its case by having recourse to an interpretation of the Qur'an.

Cope also states that "a few extremists" oppose the ban on the burqa, as though most U.S. citizens, Amnesty International, and many others aren't already clearly opposed to this fundamentally un-democratic legislation.

This op-ed from the Washington Post a few days ago had it right:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043002131.html


France must not take the drastic steps that the Belgian parliament is currently taking; it must resist the xenophobic fear-mongering of the UMP party and stand for fundamental freedoms of religion and speech.